Analisis

Digital inequality in Indonesia

Who has been left behind by the internet, and where — access, infrastructure, and the gaps between urban & rural, men & women, across 38 provinces.

Data year 2024 · trend 2021–2024
Source: BPS, Susenas & Podes

Digital divide research separates two questions: can people get online at all (access & infrastructure, the first-level divide), and what do they actually do once they are (internet usage, the second-level divide). Indonesia has largely closed the first gap for anyone within signal range — the second is where the remaining inequality actually lives.

Access & infrastructure

First-level divide

Access is rising — the rural gap is not closing at the same pace

Percentage of the population who accessed the internet in the past 3 months, national trend. A widening gap between the lines means rural areas are falling further behind even as both rise.

By area classification

Urban vs. rural, 2021–2024

By gender

Male vs. female, 2021–2024

Village-level infrastructure

Podes (village census) supply-side data — signal reach and public internet facilities.

Cellular signal strength across villages

Share of villages/kelurahan by strongest signal received, 2024

Village-office internet facilities, by condition

Of villages with an internet facility at the office, share that's actually functional

Internet usage

Second-level divide

Susenas asks people what they actually did online — not just whether they went online at all. This is the part of the divide that infrastructure spending alone doesn't fix.

What people use the internet for

Share of internet users nationally engaging in each purpose, 2024 — not mutually exclusive, people report multiple purposes

How often people go online

Frequency of internet access, national, 2024

What device people use

Share of users accessing via each media type — not mutually exclusive

Province explorer

Provinces are grouped west–to–east by island, the way they sit across the archipelago. Pick a metric — spanning both access/infrastructure and usage — to recolor the grid; click any province for its full profile.

Province profile

Pick a province for a full report — access, infrastructure, and how people there actually use the internet — benchmarked against its island and the national average.

Source: BPS–Statistics Indonesia, Statistik Telekomunikasi Indonesia 2024 (Vol. 13, 2025) — Susenas (individual/household survey) and Podes (village census). All 38 provincial units as reported, including Papua Barat Daya, Papua Selatan, Papua Tengah and Papua Pegunungan (split from Papua Barat and Papua between 2022–2023 — their 2021–2022 trend points are unavailable because the provinces did not yet exist). DKI Jakarta has no rural classification, so its urban–rural gap is shown as not applicable rather than zero. The Digital Inequality Index is an unweighted average of standardized (z-score) urban–rural gap, gender gap, no-signal village share, and non-functioning facility share — a relative ranking within this dataset, not an absolute scale. Purpose, frequency, and media-of-access figures ask respondents to report all that apply, so shares within a category do not sum to 100%. The Productive Use Index is an unweighted average of five purposes (online learning, work from home, selling goods/services, e-banking, digital content creation) and is a relative indicator, not a judgment of what internet use "should" look like.